About City Lit Theater
City Lit Theater is dedicated to the vitality and accessibility of the literary imagination. City Lit will be producing concert readings and full-stage productions of adaptations of literary material, scripted plays by language-oriented playwrights, and original material developed especially for City Lit.
We are currently actively looking for board members to increase our reach and range of experience and expertise. If you are interested or know someone who might be please get in touch with our board chair Dan Robinson for more information about what it entails (more info also here).
City Lit typically produces four-full-length stage shows a year in our 99-seat black box theater.
City Lit shares its facilities and equipment with the Chicago theater community by offering affordable rentals for performance and rehearsal.
City Lit also produces an annual series called Books on the Chopping Block (more information here), readings around the city from the most-banned books of the previous year.
As well as these, we host special events, staged readings, fundraisers and other events to engage and inform our audiences about our work and processes.
Brief history
City Lit was founded in 1979 and incorporated in 1980 by Arnold Aprill, David Dillon, and Lorell Wyatt. At the time it was the only theatre in the nation devoted to stage adaptations of literary material. Over 45 seasons, City Lit has explored fiction, non-fiction, biography, essays, and drama in performance while presenting a wide array of voices. More about our history can be found here, and you can search our past shows database (still under construction) here.
A theatre that specializes in literary work communicates a commitment to specific civilizing influences—tradition imaginatively explored, a life of the mind, trust in an audience’s intelligence—that not every cultural outlet shares. It is our mission to make theater as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. We are a Illinois not for profit corporation and a 501(c)3 federal tax-exempt organization.
We are always looking for partners, sponsors (both individual and corporate) as well as individual donations to help us to bring the work we love to the people we care about.